Montreal, March 2012 | Statement supporting the Syrian movement for dignity and self-determination and opposing militarization of the struggle and foreign military intervention.

Photo: Syrian refugees protest during a demonstration against Bashar el-Assad at Reyhanli refugee camp in Antakya, on March 15, 2012.

The Syrian people continue to demand their rights and liberties and the end of the al-Assad regime. The Syrian state has responded with brutal repression.

Since the uprising began, the Syrian regime’s propaganda machine has labelled those calling for freedom and justice “criminals”, “terrorists” and religious fanatics. It has also claimed that they are foreign agents with a mission to install a puppet regime that would abandon regional resistance movements and sign a peace agreement with Israel.

In truth, Syrians are engaged in a legitimate struggle to change an untenable local reality: a brutal authoritarian state that has governed through intimidation, fear and repression for 40 years; a security apparatus that arrests and detains citizens arbitrarily and that subjects them to torture and other abuse with impunity; increasing impoverishment, unemployment, income and wealth disparity and uncertainty about the future due to neo-liberal economic policies in recent decades.

Photo Massel Cassel A weapon is positioned at a UN base in southern Lebanon.

The international coverage of border clashes between Lebanese and Israeli military forces earlier this month may have suggested the confrontation was a mere squabble over cutting a tree that went awry in a “trigger-happy” and “conflict-prone” region. Less than a week later, one of several recent speeches by Hizballah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah managed to get brief global media coverage. He presented visual and audio material suggesting that Israel may have assassinated former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005.

BEIRUT — Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s “Lebanon” may have won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival but it has been given a hostile reception by critics and bloggers in the country it is named after.

“This film shows the Israeli point of view,” wrote the Venice correspondent of the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, which is aligned with the US-backed parliamentary majority.

BEIRUT: The Israeli Army stepped up its presence along the border with Lebanon deploying armored tanks and setting up fortifications as it intensified airspace violations in the area, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported Thursday. In “unusual military activity,” the Israeli Army deployed Merkava tanks and soldier carriers, among other armored vehicles, along the barb-wired fence separating Shebaa Farms from liberated Lebanese territories, the NNA said.

Israeli tanks were also amassing along a 5-kilometer area, stretching from Tallat Sobaih army post to Jabal al-Sheikh observatory. Sporadic gunfire was also heard throughout the day, the NNA report said.

A striking symbol for the twenty-two year Israeli military occupation in southern Lebanon is the Khiam detention center. Hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian political prisoners were detained for years at Khiam, living in squalor conditions, at times in solitary confinement and all without trial.

Multiple accounts from former prisoners at Khiam and reports issued by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International illustrate that torture was widely practiced against prisoners at Khiam. Israel’s proxy army in Southern Lebanon, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), maintained Khiam as a detention and interrogation center from 1985 until 2000 when the Israeli military was forced from southern Lebanon, leading to the collapse of the SLA.

Photo: Walking in south Lebanon 2006. Interview by Stefan Christoff for Tadamon!

In recent weeks, major media outlets in Canada have featured numerous news reports on Hezbollah, outlining that the armed Lebanese political party is planning military operations in North America. Media reports have been based on anonymous intelligence sources in the U.S. and Canada.

Major media coverage in Canada was ignited by a T.V. report from the U.S.-based ABC news network claiming that Hezbollah was planning operations in Canada in response to the assassination of Hezbollah’s military commander, Imad Mughniyeh, in Syria this past winter.

Photo: Lebanese children flee Israel’s bombing of south Lebanon in 2006.

The Lebanese government on Wednesday rejected Israel’s call for direct peace negotiations.

“Lebanon’s position is clear to all and there is no place for bilateral negotiations between Lebanon and Israel,” Premier Fouad Siniora’s media office said in a statement late Wednesday. The statement stressed that Lebanese territories occupied by the Jewish state are subject to “UN resolutions that do not require any negotiations.”